“The edits were not good. The ones that they were attributing to me… were making the sentences worse, more complex,” Angwin said. “The idea that my name would be in there giving people terrible advice is actually really appalling.”
Journalist Julia Angwin has filed a lawsuit against Grammarly, claiming that a new editorial-feedback feature that can mimic certain authors’ writing styles was released without writers’ permission or consent.
According to TechCrunch, Angwin recently filed a proposed-class action lawsuit against Superhuman, the parent company and owner of Grammarly.
“I have worked for decades honing my skills as a writer and editor, and I am distressed to discover that a tech company is selling an imposter version of my hard-earned expertise,” Angwin said in a press release.
Earlier this month, Angwin published an editorial in The New York Times in which she explained the reasoning behind the lawsuit.
“In my home state of New York, the century-old right of publicity law prohibits a person’s name or image from being used for commercial purposes without her consent,” Angwin wrote. “At least 25 states have similar publicity statutes. And now, I’m using this law to fight back. I am the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against Superhuman in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York, alleging that it violated New York and California publicity laws by not seeking consent before using our names in a paid service.”
TechCrunch notes that the litigation is somewhat ironic: Angwin has spent much of her career investigating how technology companies’ practices impact privacy. Other critics of the same kind of technology, including artificial intelligence ethicist Timnit Grebru, were also included in Grammarly’s since-deactivated “Expert Review” tool.
The Expert Review tool, adds TechCrunch, was available to subscribers who paid $144 per year.
Some professional editors, including Casey Newton—the founder and editor of a tech newsletter, whose work was also used to build Expert Review—said he’s experimented with the tool and found its feedback lack. The feedback provided by Expert Review, Newton said, was so generic that it raised the question of why a company like Grammarly would go through the hassle of using writers’ likenesses in the first place.
Angwin shared similar complaints.
“The edits were not good. The ones that they were attributing to me… were making the sentences worse, more complex,” Angwin said. “The idea that my name would be in there giving people terrible advice is actually really appalling.”
Grammarly disabled the Expert Review earlier this week.
However, while Superhuman CEO Shishir Mehrotra offered a tentative apology, he repeatedly defended the potential merits of the tool.
“Imagine your professor sharpening your essay, your sales leader reshaping a customer pitch, a thoughtful critic challenging your arguments, or a leading expert elevating your proposal,” Mehrotra wrote. “For experts, this is a chance to build that same ubiquitous bond with users, much like Grammarly has.”
Sources
A writer is suing Grammarly for turning her and other authors into ‘AI editors’ without consent
Grammarly Is Facing a Class Action Lawsuit Over Its AI ‘Expert Review’ Feature
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